Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet specs vs. Kindle Fire

Today we finally have all of the information you need to know about the new Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, therefore we thought we would compare it side-by-side with its biggest competitor, the Kindle Fire. Amazon’s tablet will arrive on November 15, whilst the Nook Tablet will arrive on the 18th, but which one should you buy? Hopefully this article will help you reach a decision.

Firstly we will look at design, both tablets feature a 7-inch display, therefore there are many similarities, however it is the fine details which separate a good device from a great one, so let’s take a closer look. The Nook Tablet measures in at 8.1 x 5.0 x 0.48 inches and will apparently weigh just 14.1 ounces, this makes it 0.5 ounces lighter than the Kindle Fire, however Amazon’s tablet is smaller in every dimension (7.5 x 4.7 x 0.45 inches).

There is not much to separate the two tablets if you compare the displays against one another, both feature a 7-inch diagonal, a 1024 x 600 resolution, 169 PPI and 16 million colors, Barnes & Noble’s IPS2 display utilizes VividView technology to keep the display clear in bright conditions, whilst the Kindle Fire’s IPS display has had an anti-reflective treatment applied. Sadly we have not seen the devices alongside eachother, therefore we can’t really tell which display looks better, but things look close.

In terms of grunt there is not a lot a great deal of difference. The Kindle Fire runs Android and features a Texas Instruments OMAP 4 dual-core processor along with 512MB of RAM. The Nook Tablet also runs a 1GHz TI OMAP4 dual-core processor, but it has 1GB of RAM. In terms of storage the Kindle Fire boasts 8GB internal (6GB available yo the user) and free cloud storage, it would be fair to say that the Nook Tablet’s 16GB of storage and microSD memory card slot (which supports cards of up to 32GB) has the edge, especially as they also throw in free Nook cloud storage.

Neither of these tablets feature 3G connectivity, however they both offer WiFi b/g/n. Once again you could argue that Barnes & Noble has the edge in this regard as they throw in free Wi-Fi in all Barnes & Noble stores, but this is not important to everyone.

Lots of people pay a lot of attention to battery life, once again the Nook Tablet outdoes the Kindle Fire, but not by a great deal. From the mains the Kindle Fire will fully charge in approximately 4 hours, with the wireless switched off it will then deliver either 8 hours of continuous reading, or 7.5 hours of video playback. The Barnes & Noble offering is said to fully charge in roughly 3 hours and with the WiFi off you can expect 11.5 hours of reading or 9 hours of video playback – that’s pretty impressive.

From a consumer point of view these are the things which are most important when comparing these devices side-by-side, however if you want to take a deeper look into technical specifications you can see full Nook Tablet specs here and full Kindle Fire tech specs here.

In terms of pricing the Kindle Fire costs $199, whilst the Nook Tablet costs $249 -a ll in all there isn’t a lot in it, but it has to be said that technically the Nook Tablet should be slightly better, that said it is very slight and perhaps not enough to justify spending an extra $50 for.